Lightning This Week | 607,974
AMP BOLT Spec, More Wumbos, Square Crypto funds pseudonym, and ZEBEDEE in Stephan Livera Podcast
Hello Lightning enthusiasts. Another ~1,000 blocks, another set of Lightning updates. Lots to get through today. Go!
Square Crypto funds pseudonymous Lightning Network Contributor ZmnSCPxj
Square Crypto have announced a new grant to fund ZmnSCPxj (Zee-man for short) a pseudonymous C-Lightning and Lightning Network contributor. Zee-man is well-known for detailed posts/reviews/proposals on the lightning-dev mailing lists — if you’re a reader like myself I’m sure you’ve seen her/his/their/its name around. Even as a part-time contributor (had a full-time job up to this point) Zee-man was able to put out such long-form high-quality content that some have jokingly rumored he/she/it is an AI. I’d imagine the contributions will only increase from here on, seeing as Zee-man can now focus full time on Lightning Network and Bitcoin.
“We don’t actually know where ZmnSCPxj lives, apart from somewhere in the GMT +8 timezone, which includes China, Brunei, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore”
Bitcoin is beautiful, and this would surely never happen in any other industry. I hope we see more of the same as we advance Bitcoin and Lightning.
Atomic Multipath Payments Bolt Specification
Exciting news this week as the BOLT specification for Atomic Multipath Payments has been merged to the Lightning RFC repository. After the initial mailing list post by Olaoluwa in February of this year, the teams behind the major node implementations have been hard at work discussing how to properly implement AMPs such that it solves the underlying issues on the protocol level, while also maintaining interoperability between the implementations. Currently in Lightning, your maximum spending amount isn’t the amount you have available on all channels combined, but the capacity available on your single largest channel. That is because up to now, HTLCs could not be ‘split up’.
If you’d like to pay a 50,000 sats invoice, and you have two channels with 25,000 sats capacity each, you currently cannot make your payment. AMPs will (in simplified theory) allow users to send 25,000 sats in each of the two channels, and have them routed to the same receiving node. AMPs will allow Lightning users to think of their balance as a single balance, regardless of whether they have 1, 10, or 100 channels with various sizes.
While the specification has now been accepted, the actual implementations in the node software are still underway. I’m really excited to see how AMPs work in practice, and I believe it will be a major push in 2020!
PR: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/pull/643
Bolt-A-Thon2 Recap
The Bolt-A-Thon virtual conference/hackathon happened last weekend and there is plenty to go over. In lieu of writing all my notes down I’ve decided to link my favorite speaker presentations and projects built below.
Advanced c-lightning Node Customization: Dangerous Hooks
Lightning in 2020
What’s Next for WhatSat
Projects
1st Place Winner — Litreon: A patreon alternative for Lightning payments and anonymous supporters: https://twitter.com/Boltathon/status/1204091423097622528
2nd Place Winner — Lightning Search Ads: Earn sats by clicking on ads when using Google or DuckDuckGo through a browser extension: https://twitter.com/Boltathon/status/1204091424334942209
3rd Place Winner —Sats Hunter: A location based “game” to increase foot traffic to Bitcoin stores by allowing people to stacksats by scanning a QR code: https://twitter.com/Boltathon/status/1204091423097622528
Full thread: https://twitter.com/Boltathon/status/1204091422065885184
New createOnion and sendOnion RPCs C-Lightning
In latest master C-Lightning (and to be released in the next v0.8.0) a node operator can now access two new RPC methods called createonion and sendonion. The idea behind these two methods is to allow C-Lightning plugins to send encrypted LN messages with any content type/payload, regardless of whether the node itself is able to understand those messages or not. This can be helpful when dealing with trampoline payments and WhatSat-like messages over LN wire.
Release Candidate for C-Lightning v0.8.0 — Blockchain Good, Orange Coin Bad
Christian Decker and the C-Lightning team have posted the first release candidate for C-Lightning v0.8.0 titled Blockchain Good, Orange Coin Bad. Node operators are encouraged to test the new features and relay issues.
Release Tag: https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/releases/tag/v0.8.0rc1
Wumbo Channel Explosion
The number of Wumbo Lightning Network channels continues to grow. As discussed in LTW 603,944 Wumbo channels are those that have a capacity larger than the 0.167 BTC limit. Since the limit is only specified in the node implementation itself rather than the core LN specification, companies and service providers seeking to have larger channels can work together to bypass the limit.
We saw Bitrefill and Bitfinex open a public Wumbo channel last week with the release of Bitfinex’s Lightning integration (LTW 606,937). Now both OpenNode and BlueWallet have also opened Wumbo channels with Bitrefill.
OpenNode’s channel is even more special as it’s the very first public 2 BTC Lightning channel in existence. Exciting times for the network!
Christian Moss Interviewed at Stephan Livera Podcast #132
ZEBEDEE’s very own Christian Moss (@mandelduck) was interviewed at the latest Stephan Livera Podcast #132. Christian, who leads Game development and LN integration at ZEBEDEE discusses the early days of Bitcoin and Gaming, experiences he’s had from building upon the base layer, and how to enable better games through the use of Lightning microtransactions.
The discussion also revolves around the history of value-transfer in Gaming, where Christian goes over his article “Does Bitcoin in Gaming Make Sense?” and gives his thoughts on how and why he envisions it to be a big driver of adoption of Bitcoin in the future.
TLDR’ed version in a Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/zebedeeio/status/1204861058197929984
Time Dilation Attacks on Offchain Protocols
Antoine Riard from Chaincode Labs put forth a lightning-dev mailing list post describing new time-dilation attacks against offchain protocols like the Lightning Network. The post goes on to detail possible attacks with regards to Targeting the CSV security delay, Targeting the per-hop CLTV-delta, and Targeting the attack difficulty.
It’s a pretty in depth research and analysis and if you are interested in learning more I’d advise you to read it in full as Antoine does a great job at explaining the attacks and possible counter-measures very succinctly (read: much better than I’d be able to).
Mailing List Post: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2019-December/002369.html
That is all for Lightning This Week. If I’ve missed something important please let me know through the comments or on Twitter.
ZEBEDEE’s mission is to develop software and infrastructure to introduce first-class Bitcoin and Lightning support into digital experiences and gaming environments. This allows players, developers, streamers, and watchers to interact and instantly exchange value in a frictionless manner.
